Animal models of social functioning disorders are commonly used in behavioural and biomedical research, aiming at developing new therapeutic and pharmacologic solutions. There is a whole range of behavioural assays for evaluation of the conspecific-related behaviour in mice. Nevertheless, available behavioural tasks usually do not allow for the longitudinal observation of between-littermate interactions. Moreover, the ‘conventional’ tasks are carried out on socially isolated animals and require animal handling by an experimenter, both of which are highly stressful for rodents.
These aforementioned factors may exert confounding anxiety-related effects on obtained data, as well as cause significant between-laboratory differences. Therefore, there is a strong need to standardize behavioural measures relevant to murine social behaviours using a fully automated system, which imitates features of the ecological niche of small rodents.
Ecologically relevant, automated tests for the assessment of mouse cognitive functioning are well established and often employed for the evaluation of mouse models of intellectual impairment, as well as in research that aims to characterize behavioural patterns in different strains of laboratory mice.
However, there are still no reliable and, at the same time, ecologically pertinent assays of social behaviour, that may be conducted for longer periods of time in group-housed mice and being fully automated.
Therefore, there is a need for assays, fulfilling the abovementioned criteria, simultaneously providing highly replicable results and the functional reliability of the analyzed behaviours. The development of the presented research technique would be highly valuable, because it allows for the reliable assessment of spontaneous conspecific-related interactions, and obtaining data on the character of these relations. The present invention provides such a technique. It also facilitates the dependable evaluation of experimental therapies and medical substances being tested in mouse models of social functioning disorders.